SPEX: A Programming Language for Software Defined Radio

High-throughput, low-power Software Defined Radio(SDR) solutions require multi-core SIMD DSP processors to meet real-time performance requirements. Given the difficulty in programming traditional DSPs, these new multi-core signal processors provide even greater challenges for programmers and compilers. In this paper, the authors describe SPEX, a programming language which is aimed at narrowing the semantic gap between the description of complex SDR systems and their implementations. SPEX supports three different types of programming semantics, allowing SDR solutions to be developed with a divide-and-conquer approach.